Hersha Hospitality Expands and Thrives with a Multi-Faceted and Flexible Tech Plan | Top Stories | | Hospitality Magazine (HT) - 0 views
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A thousand points of social data With guest feedback rapidly shifting from traditional, solicited surveys to spontaneous web dialogue, HHM began researching different methodologies for understanding its own social presence.
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HHM runs a diverse profile of widespread properties, including independent boutiques plus brands such as Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, Starwood, Intercontinental Hotels, Choice, Wyndham and Carlson. Starting out in the 1980s in the select-service business, HHM has steadily scaled the organization to include 20 hotels in a full-service division as well. Despite this diversity, HHM prides itself on maintaining open lines of communication between properties and brands in order to allow owners to choose the solutions and strategies that make the most sense for their unique needs, while investing capital dollars intelligently across its network. In addition to guest feedback, three other areas drive HHM’s IT effort: identifying must-have technology, investing in multi-purpose when possible, and ensuring rock-solid execution.
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“The beauty of harnessing all of this data is it’s more of a conversation that we are getting back from guests now,” Murray insists. “It’s an instantaneous check about what they feel about a product. Get into any customer’s head or heart at the moment they are feeling it and you can move that customer much faster and certainly turn them around much quicker. If they get the feeling that you found out about a problem and reacted to it before they even thought to tell you about it because they put it on some Twitter feed, and they come back to their room and it’s already been fixed — that’s real serious stuff.”
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IT investment is one of the most necessary cost for most hospitality properties and play more and more important role in today's hotel or restaurant operation. For this reason, some of the large hotel groups have started to invest in this field and achieved a favorable result sine the increasing of profit and brand value. On the other hand those small properties can work together to develop and share resources in their operation. I believe a hotel without IT investment may rapidly lose the position in the market.
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A property management company is investing in diversifying their technology portfolio to tailor specific brands and to it's market, while maintaining standards. One of their main focuses is on guest feedback on hotel stays, and ways to improve in real time solutions. By collecting data from social sites properties are able to provide actionable responses to guests concerns. For instance taking care of a problem after reading a posting on Twitter and the issue being resolved by the time the guest returns to their room. Instantaneous info and reacting to that info creates a satisfied guest and a well a maintained brand and image of the property.